With Great Power comes Few Responsibilties
I once worked with an organization that invested millions in a new technology. In the eyes of senior leadership, this was an important project! But when I spoke to the team leading this project they bemoaned the challenge of getting buy-in across the organization. The CEO may have been bought in, but all of the various VPs and Directors, the people who could really unlock its potential, were not. How could this be the case?
Simply put, the technology team was not empowered. And this lack of empowerment didn’t come from a lack of something, a lack of financial resources or a lack of executive buy-in. Their lack of empowerment came from an overabundance of something, specifically, an overabundance of company responsibilities.
Now, if I was a nerd, I’d try to write some sort of mathematical equation for empowerment that grossly oversimplifies the messy realities of real life.
Anyway, consider this: E= P/R. Where E means empowerment, P is the sum of all power a company has (financial, political and informational) and R is the number of responsibilities that company has. The fewer responsibilities given, the more empowering the company is.
The good question is: why does limiting responsibilities increase empowerment? Doesn’t giving people more projects, more opportunities mean giving them more power?
Not at all.
Because power is capped. For every responsibility you add, you’re empowering another responsibility less. Money and time (aka financial power) are finite. Context (informational power) is overwhelming when overshared. But why is political power limited? Why can’t a leader go around, Oprah style, saying to every employee “You get to lead a project. And you get a project! Aaaaand you get a project!!”
Because, as I wrote before, political power relies on two aspects:
Everybody knows this person is responsible for this thing
Everybody knows that this thing, for which this person is responsible, is a priority.
Let’s go back to the example from the top. How could a company empower financially but disempower politically? Because that whole project amounted to two slides in a 170 slide deck that contained many more, totally unrelated priorities. If I’m a VP on a different team in the organization, why should I be proactive in helping out the tech initiative? I won’t be obstructive. I’ll help if needed. But I will not be thinking about how to ensure the success of every project. Far from being empowered, now the technology team must fight for the mindshare of many well-meaning, but distracted internal stakeholders.
So if you want to empower your teams, find your to-do list and reach for a big red pen.
